Alma Alexander

Language and communication comes in many shapes and forms.

It is entirely possible to use the written word as a laser pointer, not the ultimate destination – and allow the thing you are writing ABOUT, or pointing AT, to carry the story forward rather than scintillating verbal pyrotechnics by themselves.

A case in point is the language of flowers – because they mean different things to different people, cultural norms attach different contexts (or none at all) to individual kinds of flowers, certain scents might bring some very specific memories to your mind.

Case #1 in my own Flower Story Book occurred some, oh, ten or so years ago – the first time that the man who was subsequently to become my husband and I actually met face-to-face after a long time of being friends in cyberspace and spending hours talking to one another in email or ICQ. The meatspace meeting went just fine and we liked each other a lot in person, as much as, if not more, than we had liked one another’s cyber-persona. And then, as he was getting ready to leave the city where we had both travelled to in other to effect this meeting and go home, I turned up to say goodbye for the nonce… bearing a yellow rose.

Now, to me that was just a pleasant gesture – and yellow roses are my absolute favourite amongst the rose family (red – unless truly spectacular – are too cliché, white are pretty but have no real personality, pink are wishy washy, everything else is unnatural). So I picked a yellow rose for no other reason except that I liked it.

My New England-bred man grew up in a context where a yellow rose meant something quite specific – FRIENDSHIP. What I was telling him was simply, “Travel safe, it was great to have met you, I like you, see you around in cyberspace, and oh yeah, I LIKE you, so here’s a flower which should make you remember me with pleasure”. What he heard, via the medium of the yellow rose, was something quite different: “Yes, I like you, but this will never go anywhere at all beyond friendship. So back off and don’t take it any further than it has already come.”

We only found out about this particular misunderstanding MONTHS later. We didn’t get married until YEARS later. If I had known about what yellow roses meant in his world I would probably have picked something else to give him as a parting present. If he had known what a yellow rose meant to me, he would have saved himself a lot of heartache.

See? Instant story. Not a word exchanged. There are languages and stories where you least expect them; you have to learn to recognise and understand them.

All the other cases in my Flower Story Book have to do with my deeply beloved Grandmother.

I remember, very many years ago when I was just a little girl, Grandma and I went together to a mountain called Zlatibor (if you HAVE to have it translated it means something like “golden pine”). I don’t remember the circumstances of this trip, why we were there, why the two of us were there as opposed to any other cast of characters. I do recall running, running, running through mountain meadows in the sunlight, followed by her walking sedately behind me and smiling – and gathering up lots and lots and lots and LOTS of wild daffodils. We carried armfuls of them down the mountain with us. We carried them home with us on the bus. We filled vases and washbasins and kitchen sinks with these things – the house was yellow with them, glowing with them, and they carried with them the memory of mountain sunlight and the sunshine of Grandma’s smile. Years later, when she died, I wrote a poem for her that said goodbye. It was the daffodils that came back to me then, came into the poem. I said, in the last line, that I hoped that there were daffodils beside the road, wherever she had gone. And that if she saw them she would remember me.

The same Grandmother used to give me flowers for my birthday every year – and every year it was a bouquet of red gladioli. I associate red gladioli with my birthday and with July and with my Gran to this day. If I am back in my home town in remotely the right season, every time I return to her grave I take her a bouquet of red gladioli – because she always, always, had them for me. It feels like she is still here and real and alive – in my heart she is, she always will be – but when I sit on her gravestone and see her name and the dates of birth and death etched into the marble and the cold hard fact that she is no longer of this earth is staring me in the face – well – I lift my eyes and look on the long stalks of red gladioli and I feel her hand touch mine once again, just like before. We were special, she and I – and those flowers, they mean something to her and to me. They say, hello, I am here, I have not forgotten, I will never forget. I love you.

She had a garden, Grandma, where hundreds of hyacinths bloomed every spring. The place was solid with the scent of them, and it is a smell I associate very strongly with her – and when I planted my own garden, here in my home, I planted hyacinths in the front flower bed, in her memory – and every spring I am reminded of those springs long past when I was six or seven years old and the hyacinths where hers. But there’s an odd story attached to the hyacinths and to Grandma.

She was years dead by the time I got my first real research job in a whirring, sterile, polished, very sophisticated laboratory at the University of Cape Town – NOT a place that was very conducive to flights of fancy or to haunting presences, this was the place where facts lived, just the facts, ma’am, thank you, and if it wasn’t empirically provable it had no place there.

And yet, there I was one day, walking briskly through the corridors empty of anything other than those facts… and smelling hyacinths. VERY strongly. Hyacinths that could not possibly have been there – it was a LAB, for heaven’s sake, and such things were frowned on, and anyway it was July and it was the Southern Hemisphere and it was mid-WINTER. And yet I could smell them, and smell them quite clearly. There was no doubt about that. I wandered into individual laboratories, asking if anybody had hyacinths in there, meeting mystified glances and puzzled shakes of the head – I’m sure my colleagues must have thought I was losing my mind.

And then I realised that it wasn’t just July. It was July 5^th. My birthday.

And that my Grandmother had merely come to smooth down my unruly curls and smile that smile that lit up a mountain once upon a time and wish me happy birthday.

And the tears came to my eyes and I looked up and I said thank you. And the hyacinths faded gently away.

Here, writer, if writer you be. Have a flower. You tell me what it is, and what it means to you.

Epiphanies are odd things.

There I was, mumble thousand miles above the planet, laterally squished in my window seat by a fellow passenger with a well-endowed caboose which kept spilling into my space, staring out of the window, waiting for the flight to end (ladies and gentlemen, I love being in new places, but I loathe the getting there. Scotty, please invent that transporter thing already…)

And there below me, a long, long way below, lay mountains and fields and rivers and roads and little smudges of towns clustered around intersections or river bends. And between me and the ground… were the clouds.

Now, I was above the clouds, and I could see them clearly from my vantage point for what they were – wispy, insubstantial, many of them practically see-through, their edges ragged and unravelled, beautiful in their near-chaos, making sense to eye and mind on an aesthetic level as well as the purely physical stuff I knew about clouds from high school science classes. In molecular terms they barely existed – they were mist and promise, a fleeting congregation of water vapour and air and mystery, quickly formed, quickly gone, quickly forgotten or mistaken for others just like themselves. Beautiful, but hard to grip, hard to come to terms with, hard to describe, nebulous (that very word defines what they are – insubstantial, “cloud-like”). They are stories spun from nothing, they are made of nothing, a plane can fly through one without even noticing it is there. And yet you can look at one and know what kind of story it contains – a thunderhead, a snow-cloud, one of those puffy white jobs that dot summer skies so that the blue won’t get boring.

And then my eye slipped down, through, below. And these wispy insubstantial, hard-to-grasp things floating in mid-air… cast shadows on the ground.

And the shadows were nothing like the thing they reflected.The shadows were not wispy, insubstantial, unravelling at the periphery. The shadows were sharp – there was an edge to them, a line, and on this side of the line it was dark, and on that side of the line it was light. Down on the ground, it was uncompromising, clear, unequivocal. The ground did not know clouds like I knew clouds – it could not look at them from above and know what the true story was. It only knew what the clouds chose to tell – that they were present, or they were absent. What happened next, the ground found out for itself, the hard way. No prescience. No visual clues except the clarity of the dividing line between shadow and light.

And thus, the epiphany.

Stories are like this. When the writer first finds them, they’re hanging in the air like clouds do. They are drifty, pervasive, beautiful; their true nature is easier to see, because they are laid out below the writer’s eye and there are no secrets there. But the reader – the reader has to have the secrets. The reader also has to have a clarity of vision which enables those secrets to be understood. The writer’s job is to render the hard-to-grasp nebulosity of the story/cloud into the sharp clarity and understanding of the story/groundshadow, something that gives the reader a clear and comprehensible insight into the tale the writer is spinning, without ONCE letting go of the idea that the clouds THEMSELVES are still there, that there is a story beyond the story, that the writer needs to be bigger than their universe and see it all and understand it all and then give enough to the reader to give them the capability of understanding that part of it that the writer has seen fit to to show them, the particular shadow, the edge of shadow, in which a story lives.

The story is what the writer makes the reader THINK they are seeing – the sharp shadow on the ground – rather than everything possible that the story can be – the drifting cloud in the sky.

So, then. Which cloud carries YOUR story…?